A Very Preliminary Look at the Resto Druid MoP Talent and Ability Changes28 comments

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to make a post about MoP changes this early into the Beta process because everything is subject to change, and many things likely will be changed. I had the best intent of keeping that promise, I really did. However when I opened up my feedreader this morning and saw some of the datamined information on MMO-Champion, my resolve erroded. Mostly because I do have some strong opinions on some of the things that I’ve read about to date, and I don’t like a good deal of it. As such, I thought I’d go ahead and give my thoughts on some of the reworked talents and abilities, because if I complacently don’t say anything I don’t really have the right to criticize it later.

Let’s take a look at what we have coming down the pike, shall we? As we have this discussion, please take note that this is an extremely early examination of these abilities and they are all subject to changing as the beta progresses. I only pulled out the mostly resto-centric abilities and talents, so this is not a comprehensive list of all of the changes. I would recommend checking out the post over on MMO-Champion if you are looking for the full list.

These are in no specific order, just listed out as I went through them.

Dream of Cenarius: New. Wrath, Starfire, Starsurge, and melee abilities increase healing done by your next healing spell by 30%. Non-instant casts of Nourish, Healing Touch, and Regrowth increase the damage done by your next damaging spell or ability by 30%. Each of these bonuses lasts 30 sec and cannot be gained more often than once every 30 sec.

As this reads currently, I feel that this is the best of our three talent options, but I’m not overly thrilled with it. Basically, as I read it, it is going to be the expectation that we weave in a damage spell/attack every 30 seconds to receive a 30% boost to our healing ability. My biggest issue with this is that it’s going to be something that we will desire to have 100% as much uptime on as possible to maximize our output as a healer – and it’s another thing that we will need to track and additional global cooldowns that we will have to use just to be able to heal well. We are already pushing every GCD we have to be competitive healers, and we can expect to have to do more GCD juggling to incorporate the clunky “healing mushroom” abilities. Having to find a way to weave in a DPS spell every 30 seconds seems somewhat cumbersome. I don’t feel that it’s going to be “interesting” or “engaging”, I feel that it’s going to be cumbersome and frustrating.

To me this seems maybe more PvP oriented. But again, this talent is ripe with one issue for me: I’m a healer, I want to heal. I don’t want to have some super power that lets me deal mediocre damage once every six minutes. In all honesty, I see little reason for a PvE healer to take this talent outside of a few exceptions that may arise from raid content where an all out burn is called for everyone in the raid. I’m just not overly thrilled about it in this iteration of the ability.

Healing Touch: Now costs 25% of base mana, down from 30%. Cast time reduced to 2.5 sec, down from 3 sec.

Nourish: Now costs 8% of base mana, down from 10%. Now has a 2.5 sec cast time, down from 3 sec.

This is a slight mana reduction in both spells, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see fluctuate in any direction between now and release. However, the more interesting part of this is to see that the cast time on Healing Touch and Nourish has been reduced. This is likely the result of the removal of Naturalist.

Incarnation: Tree of Life: Now lasts 30 sec, up from 25 sec. No longer costs mana. You may freely shapeshift in and out of this form for its duration.

Incarnation is in the fourth tier of our talents and you will have to choose between ToL and Force of Nature. However, I mention this not because of the slight increase in duration for ToL, but rather because of the ability to shift out of ToL without completely losing the cooldown. This is good news for those who have fat fingered the wrong button while in ToL or want to shift into cat/bear form while ToL is active. I am happy to see this change.

Innervate: Now grants 10% mana regeneration, up from 5%. Now grants 10% additional mana regeneration when cast on the player, down from 15%.

This is a nerf slight buff to innervate when cast on someone other than yourself. Like with Healing Touch, this number may well see some flucuation over the course of the beta. I honestly don’t know what this nerf is going to mean for us. I’m not thrilled to see it considering the mana issues we experienced with T13, but I’m also not raging over it either. I think it’s too early to determine the effect the nerf will have for us, but it’s certainly something we should keep an eye on throughout the course of the beta. Self casting innervate looks to restore the same amount of mana as it does currently.

Nothing wrong with this here, a small decrease in the cost of this ability – something that is seen with a good number of our abilities in these notes. It’s too early to know that these numbers are final, but I’m never going to complain about the possibility of the cost of our spells being decreased!

Living Seed: Now only procs off of the direct healing portion of the spells. No longer grants “a chance to plant a Living Seed”, instead just will “plant a Living Seed”.

It looks like there is now a 100% chance of living seed being applied to the target. Which is good. Unfortuantely, living seed is still pretty terrible and I’m disapointed that we haven’t seen this spell reworked to be more functional as a whole. Alas, I won’t complain about the change, which is a good thing.

Mark of the Wild: Now grants Intellect instead of Stamina. No longer grants increased magical resistances. Now costs 22% of base mana, down from 24%.

Yay for intellect! I guess? I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about this change. It just sort of is, although I believe it’s part of the effort to streamline buffs for MoP.

I’m actually really disappointed to see this change. I know that it’s likely a PvP driven change, but I used Nature’s Grasp all of the time in PvE – especially in dungeons with a green tank or on a pull that got out of control. I know it’s not game breaking or anything, it was just a particularly nice survival tool that I’m sad to see get a bit of a nerf.

Nature’s Swiftness: Now has a 1 min cooldown, down from 3. Now when activated, your next Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Healing Touch, Hibernate, Nourish, Rebirth, or Regrowth becomes instant, free, and castable in all forms. The healing and duration of the spell is increased by 50%.

This is in our second tier of talents, and honestly is really the only one that will offer anything directly to healing. I am happy to see the one minute cooldown on the ability with this talent, but the 50% increase in potency is still a little “meh”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to snag it up and use the ever living snot out of it on a one minute cooldown. I just wish that it did something a little more interesting that give me a 50% boost to my HT.

Rejuvenation: Now heals for 2973 and an additional 2973 every 3 sec for 12 sec. Now costs 16% base mana, down from 20%.

This is an interesting change. It bakes in the Gift of the Earthmother part of Rejuvenation – but it also gives it a healthy boost as well, as GotEM only gave an instant heal equal to 15% of the total periodic effect. This is a nice change, I think. It gives our rejuv the ability to give a little bit of oomph upon casting it, which will help. It doesn’t solve or fix any of our current burst healing issues, but it is a step in the right direction. The mana reduction, while not final, is also welcome as well.

So a slight decrease in the mana cost, but an 8 second cooldown. Um….okay? I guess dispelling wasn’t the “interesting” decision they wanted it to be this expansion after all, so they wanted to make it more interesting? Alternatively, I suppose it could be a PvP related nerf – but I see this having an equal impact in both worlds. I’m curious to see how it plays out. There is a lot of potential for logistical nightmares in raids and dungeons depending on the use of debuff mechanics, but I think it’s a “wait and see” sort of thing.

Swiftmend: No longer named Efflorescence. Instantly heals a friendly target that has an active Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect for 9805, and restores 1177 health to the three most injured allies within 8 yards of the initial target every 1 sec for 7 sec.

It looks like we get a boost to the healing done by Swiftmend itself, and unless my math is way off (which is always a possibility!) it seems like a decent buff to the effloresence portion as well. Granted, the boost could simply be to accomodate for the additional 5 levels that we are going to be seeing, but it feels like it’s a slightly stronger spell even taking that into account.

Symbiosis: New. Creates a symbiotic link which grants the Druid one ability belonging to the target’s class, varying by the Druid’s specialization. In exchange, grants the target one Druid ability based on their class and combat role. Lasts 1 hour and persists through death. Cannot be cast on other Druids. Effect cancelled if Druid and target become too far apart. 4% of base mana, 6 sec cast, 30 yd range.

There just isn’t even enough information about this available to speculate, guess or offer valid input on this ability. So I’m not going to. Shove this firmly into the “wait and see” category and plan to follow it’s progression as we get deeping into the beta, and closer to release.

Not much to see here, other than a slight decrease in the cost of these abilities. With all of the decreases that we’ve seen, I wonder if it’s what has driven the innervate change. I’m ok with the decrease, although it’s not final, and I’m sure we’ll see the numbers adjusted as the beta progresses.

Wild Mushroom: Bloom: New. Grow a magical Mushroom with 5 Health at the target location. After 6 sec, the Mushroom will become invisible. When triggered by the Druid, all Mushrooms will bloom healing all allies within 6 yards for 4264 to 5159. Only 3 Mushrooms can be placed at one time. Use Wild Mushroom: Bloom to trigger all Mushrooms.

I’m going to put these two together, because of the way that they are tied in. I’m also going to go ahead and say that I’m so disapointed to see this ability as our healing “fix” I don’t even have words to express my level of disapointment. In all of the things that I’ve been on the fence about with regards to druids in MoP, this one has pushed me farther away from wanting to play my druid than any of the others. I suspect at this juncture, we are stuck with it. But perhaps we can make the ability less terrible and more appealing.

Before I get to the mountain of problems that this has for a healer, let’s look at the one positive that I can see: a three mushroom detonate looks to do a decent amount of healing.

Now for the mountain of problems, where do we even start? Let’s start with the need to have three mushrooms down to do the amount of healing required to make this ability even worth our time. Three mushrooms, is 1.5 GCDs worth of cast time, which in and of itself isn’t terrible. However, you have to place the damn things utilizing the horribly clunky mushroom targetting mechanic that requires you to not only select to place a mushroom, but click on the ground where you’d like it placed. Not just once, but three times. Once you’ve done that you have to convice your raid to stay within the miniscule space of 6 yards of your mushrooms. And you better hope the raid doesn’t have to move after you planted those suckers.

I mean, come on. Didn’t all of the struggles we saw with Shaman this expansion teach anything?

All of the above doesn’t even begin to address the 10 second cooldown on the bloom. Ok, so we can have some burst AE healing, in the limited confines of 6 yards, but only once every ten seconds? Are PoH and Holy Radiance receiving some similar cooldown on their triggers that I just didn’t read about? I’m really not trying to be some huge negative nancy about this – I just don’t honestly see how this is a practical solution for us. I get that maybe it looks good on paper (ok…maybe I don’t even see that) but in practical implementation it’s just fucking terrible. I pray that it does not go live in this implementation and if you feel as strongly as I do about it, I would encourage those of you with beta access (regardless of when you get it) to go in, test the snot out of it and offer feedback to Blizzard. Perhaps if we storm like the Ents to Isengaurd, our concerns will be heard. Alternatively, Blizzard will just end up with a lot of large trees on their lawn – but I’d like to think that if we are articulate and consistent with our concerns, someone will be listening.

Omen of Clarity: Your periodic healing from Lifebloom has a 4% chance to cause you to enter a Clearcasting state. The Clearcasting state reduces the Mana, Rage or Energy cost of your next cast-time damaging or healing spell or offensive feral ability by 100%.

Regrowth: Now costs 29% of base mana, down from 35%. Now also has a 60% increased chance for a critical effect and its duration automatically refreshes to 6 sec each time it heals targets at or below 50% health.

This is interesting. They have baked in Nature’s Bounty and the current Regrowth glyph. I like this change, as the Regrowth glyph was always very situational, at best, and Regrowth has been a bit of a lackluster ability this expansion. This coupled with the new Regrowth glyph could meen some interesting things for Regrowth as we move forward. There is also a slight reduction in the cost of the ability.

Revitalize: Reworked: When you periodically heal with your Rejuvenation or Lifebloom spells, you have a 20% chance to instantly regenerate 2% of your total mana. This effect cannot occur more than once every 12 sec.

Unless I’m mising something, it seems that the only change here is the removal of our ability to offer replenishment. And unless I’m further mistaken, I don’t believe that’s a huge deal.

While keeping in mind that these are very preliminary changes, I’m curious to know what everyone else thinks about them. Are there any that you are thrilled with? Any that you have concerns about?

28 responses to “A Very Preliminary Look at the Resto Druid MoP Talent and Ability Changes”

I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the decrease in mana cost for abilities but not mention anything about the fact that int no longer increases our mana pools. From everything I see that is still happening correct? Pretty sure all the reduced costs are mainly due to the fact that our mana pool will basically be our base mana pool from now on instead of how it is now.

You know, I didn’t even really think about that. All of the reduced mana costs are just kind of “there” changes for me. I don’t really feel strongly about them in any way at this juncture, and figure they’ll either be functional or not, and will be adjusted accordingly.

Personally i am super uninspired by end 3 choice of talents. Like you, i heal to heal, not to do a crappily mediocre job of 2jobs instead. I am very interested to see whether its going to be better to pick the new ToL or whether those lil treants and their extra mushrooms are even better for that!

Am i just reading it wrong or has tranquility been nerfed to only hit 5 people now?

I read Dream of Cenarius differently. As I read it, the 30% boost is only to the next spell. So Starfire + Tranq would be awesome but Starfire + Rejuv would just empower that one rejuv and not the rest of our heals over the next 29 seconds. You could get close to 100% uptime on the debuff (assuming there is one) but not 100% uptime on 30% more healing. At the end of a fight, I don’t see effective use of this resulting in 30% more healing done. It sounds like something we’ll want to use in order to buff a tranq or efflorescence or wild growth.

Still, I agree that it feels a bit awkward both mechanically and conceptually. Atonement smiting didn’t turn out to be very satisfying.

Oh, I think you are right. I somehow overlooked the “next healing spell” when I was reading through it. Regardless, it is still the same sort of clunky interruption in our healing just to be able to boost our output, and will still have to be tracked so that you can keep maximum uptime on the ability.

Seems to me that the BIG problem with the mushrooms is that there are 3 of them. If it takes 4 GCDs the heal would need to be fairly large in order for it to compete with our other heals when it comes to HpET. If the heal is big enough to be worth using 4 GCDs on, it will be too much AoE burst healing. The easy answer is to only allow a single healing shroom at a time, it will be much easier to balance that way. That would also cut the chunkiness by a factor of 3.

the targeting issue is much more subjective, when I heal on my shaman, I kinda like targeting HR, it’s fun to interact with the game space like that. some people may hate it but I would not say that this preference is universal.

The 6 yard issue is somewhat mitigated by moving to one big shroom. its not like HR where the shaman has to hope the raids does not move for 10s, in a one shroom system you place it where people are and immediately pop it. all the healing is done once it pops so there is no need to worry about the raid moving out of range.

I am not sold on this concept by any means but I don’t think I share your despair about it. With some tweaks, this can become a workable spell that fills a real whole in our tool kit. If it went live as is, it would be either useless or OP, the long set up time makes it impossible (in the literal sense) to balance properly If it’s worth it, its too powerful so it cannot be worth the time, meaning it is useless. not to mention how clunky dropping 3 shrooms would be.

One thing to remember about wild mushrooms is that there is a shortend GCD, such that placing three of them is only ~1.5 GCDs, with another to “bloom”. However, you are spot on with the issue with the targetting/placement being that, as the talent currently stands, it requires three mushrooms placed. While I still wouldn’t be thrilled with the ability, only having to place one mushroom would make it significantly less painful.

It’s always felt to me like someone in the Dev team won (or lost… >.> ) a bet and the mushroom mechanic was invented.

Mushroom placement is clunky, expecially for resto’s where most (all??) people are using raid frames as their targeting mechanism. Stopping to target the ground is a pain. The easy solution, so to cast them onto someone (mushrooms growing on people!) and then bloom them at a later time. At some point during most strat’s there is a “stack phase” – range stack, melee stack, everyone stacks. There would be plenty of opportunities to bloom them; as there is for efflorescence now.
This removes the crappy targeting/placement technique, and ensures that the bloom from all three will hit atleast one person, and not be completely wasted.
I think combining mushrooms and the living seed mechanic could be interesting – three “living seeds” that you have to manually “bloom”.

I hate the mushrooms. Hate them. I hated them when I was boomkin too (or when I was trying to help with AoE as resto). I hope they go away and I never have to use them. The ‘let’s DPS to heal’ talent seems like something which will get replaced by a better option in the tier, so I won’t worry about it for now. Sounds decent for PvP at least.

And I have a weirder complaint: right now, on the beta, if you have Glyph of the Treant you can look like the old tree all the time, right? But when you pop ToL you get turned into the new tree and ughhhhh. I’d go for Tree Army in that tier, but I have a feeling ToL will be a better choice number-wise… I hope they’ll let me keep my treant even when popping the cooldown.

I’m not sure how the numbers between Incarnation and Force of Nature will turn out when all is said and done. I suspect it will largely depend on how smart the treants are – on live, the are pretty damn dumb! The one downside that I see with Force of Nature is that I don’t control where my heals go. I don’t know if that’s a hugely negative thing, but I can certainly see some benefits to having the ability to direct my “buffed” healing as opposed to letting Blizzard’s AI decide where to put it.

I’m pretty sure you read the innervate change incorrectly. It currently is listed as doing 5% mana regen + 15% bonus regen if cast on self (eg 20% total). Contrast that with the new 10% regen + 10% bonus regen if cast on self. That is still 20% self regen. It is really just a buff to casting it on *other* players.

Hrm, you may well be correct on that. I read the two parts of it seperately rather than together, although in re-reading it with your view, I do think that you are correct that this is going to stay a constant 20%.

I am trying to figure out where they’re wanting to go with druid healing in MoP, but I’m getting really lost. The biggest “huh?” for me is the whole damage to heal more thing. You’re right, we already have SO many CDs to track and now we’ll just have more… Shroom-Bloom, Treants, Cenarion Ward, damage = +healing ICD. Honestly, I’m going to run out of Aura space.

It was bad enough when Shaman got soul-link while we were stuck with a reduced Tranq CD as a “fix” to our AoE healing, but this mushroom business is just insulting.

I feel that druids never really “fit” into the cataclysm healing design particularly well, and we basically received one bandaid fix after another to try and push our square peg into the round hole of healing. I’d like to think that we’ll be more streamlined in MoP, but I just don’t know. It will be interesting seeing how everything works after they add monks into the mix (who looking to be extremely powerful healers at the moment). I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out during the beta🙂

Just occurred to me I look like some sort of link advertiser. Lol. It WAS an interesting read, and all I wanted to say about mushrooms was already said by the commenters above me.. mainly that they are meh.

Our resto shaman is very militant about getting people to stand in the large blue circle and atleast everyone can see it and react. If you spot the mushrooms you still dont know how large the explosion is going to be.

As a boomkin i don’t have that much difficulty placing mushrooms (macro’d and allocated to ‘r’ so I have a single key (and mouse button) to place and explode them) and I dont see resto being that much more difficulty. How much we get to use them is another matter I suppose. How many fights in DS would be easier if you had them now? Just slap them on the melee group when you have a spare GCD until the AoE comes in? Place them on stacking points? I dont see them used every CD for most fights but you probably would on Ultraxion at the very least?

You are one of the few moonkin that I’ve spoken with who hasn’t hated placing mushrooms this expansion ^.^

I too have mine keybound, but that doesn’t make it any less cumbersome in my opinion. If it was just one mushroom, maybe that would be ok, but to have to do three to get the full potency of the heal? That’s problematic. The issue is that this is supposed to be our “fix” for lacking burst AE healing, our way to get the raid topped up quickly, if they aren’t used with regularity to meet that goal, what’s the point in having them? If they are too cumbersome to bother with, what did we gain? Are you going to tell a priest not to PoH, or a paladin not to HR during heavy burst phases?

I don’t know, it just isn’t a very elegant solution to the gaps missing in our toolkit.

I’ve enjoyed reading your blog for some time now. It’s interesting to me to read about druid healing from a rather different perspective from my own. While I’m an unrepentant altoholic, I’ve been primarily a holy paladin since UBRS was practically end-game content, and I absolutely love where paladin healing is now, but I’m also very happy with my relatively new worgen ex-boomkin-mostly-healer. When I first built a resto spec for him, “just in case” (right), I felt like I had too many spells that did basically the same thing with icons that were all some kind of damned leaves and too little ability to deal with someone taking tons of damage right-gottdamn-now, but I really grew to like the combination of prediction and reaction that he has. I might have slight preferences between the two of them from one fight to the next (healadin with blue crystal on Ultraxion FTW), for the most part I don’t really care which one I run.

While you struggle with the limitations you find at your level of content, down here in what I’d guess would be the lower middle class in Rohan’s terms, I tend to find myself reacting to your frustrations with druid healing with a “really?” My healers spend their time doing 10man Normal 5/8 in a casual guild that is as old as dirt (as are many of our members) and seeing just how much I can carry bad LFR groups (successfully 2-healing Madness thanks to the asshats who queued as healers and played DPS instead). At my level of content, and with my playing peers, your fixes to druids would probably feel OP. With most WoW players probably much closer to my experience than to yours, it may help explain why Blizz fails to fix your problems.

On another note, the problem with putting down shrooms is that things and/or people walk under my target location just as I’m trying to place the damned things. As a healer, I don’t always have time to lose a second here and there to mushroom targeting problems. I don’t mind the idea of using a relative lull to place mushrooms for an upcoming burst, but I’d want a smoother placement mechanism. I’d say to switch mushrooms to a single placement, but the ability to separately place each mushroom can be handy, especially with Fungal Growth. Also, if each of your three shrooms has a 6 yard radius and you place them well, you’ve actually covered a pretty large area or a couple of smaller areas.

I’m 6/8 hc, on my resto druid main, and it’s really a different game alltogether. I hate to sound like a snotty elitist or even worse, a bad pop/rnb song, but there’s weaknesses to the druid that only show when you push it to the limit.

It’s not snotty when you’re directly addressing my point, Muriac.🙂 I really did mean that it’s interesting to see that something that works as well as it does at normal levels breaks down at the heroic levels. I didn’t mean to imply that Beru doesn’t know what she’s doing.

6/8 Normal now, BTW. We accidentally one-shotted Warhamster as if we knew what we were doing, which was a little problematic for us leadery sorts, as we’d never even asked our people to study the Spine fight, expecting to spend a few weeks on the gunship.

While i have only tried the 2 first MoP instances since that is all that we have had available in the beta so far i have to say resto feelt quite good, healing mushrooms is a bit iffy but aslong as you know when the damage will come and have a pre determend stack point they are quite nice.

While i think Natures Swiftness will probably be prefered in raids Cenarion Ward is atleast in 5 mans a nice heal with its uses.
Force of nature isn’t exactly the embodyment of intelligence but atleast all three of them spamheal for their entire duration.

The last tire is a bit lackluster for every spec, Disentanglement is a nice self heal and Heart of the wild is nice if there is a all out burnphase or a fight where you need less healing for a 40-60 sec period of the fight so some healers can nuke but over all the last tire is dissapointing.

The 8 sec dispell CD is implemented on all dispell effects so hopefully the encounters will not require stupid things like predetermend dispell orders or other not so fin mechanics.

Druids don’t look too good this expansion, and i’m one of the few druids who love to mix it up by using all my classes abilities, having bound all my feral and balance abilities aswell as resto ones, and i get to use them once in a while too.

But i’m a healer, you know? And i look at resto shammies this xp, and with their instant riptide glyph, their ascendance form, and tranq totem, in addition to having the strongest single target heals in the game? I don’t know if i can justify my hc raiding existence to my raidleader next xp. Why bring me when a shaman can do it all better, is what it feels like.

Either way, i’ve made it my mission to beat the odds, and if we do turn out to stink too much for mop, i’ll welcome the chance to roll a monk healer. I’d miss my druid, and be sadface while doing it though.

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